The Missing of the Somme

Geoff Dyer helps the world to remember the veterans who perished in The Great War. This is not a book on war; it is a book on how we remember a war and those who perished in it. Antony Ferguson narrates this short piece with just a hint of solemnity--appropriate for this subject--without becoming overly grave or somber. The author creatively uses art, photography, and poetry to make his point. The audio medium works especially well for the poetry--written more for the ear than the eye--and Ferguson does it justice. But a listener may long to see the images in the print edition to which Dyer frequently refers, though the audio version works without them. S.K.G. (c) AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

August 1, 2011
This instant classicâfirst published in 1994 and now available in the U.S.âby acclaimed British author Dyer (Otherwise Known as the Human Condition) presents an extended "meditation" on the Great War's contemporary and historical meanings. Dyer was one of the first to interpret war in the context of the quest for "memory and meaning" made familiar by Jay Winter and David Gregory. For the British, "the war helped to preserve the past even as it destroyed it," and provided a caesura between a stable past and an uncertain future. Dyer supports his point with an impressive survey of poems, letters, memoirs, and novels, combined with a perceptive analysis of British war memorials, and utilizing extensive citations. He concludes with an elegiac description of a peaceful, isolated Somme battlefield: "where terrible violence has taken place the earth will sometimes generate an equal and opposite sense of peace." Ironically, Dyer's contribution to making the Great War part of the Matter of Britain also helped transform the Somme into a center of tourism and pilgrimage, vulgar but vital.